Show HN: Generate Google Slides from Markdown

I'd also like to share patat [0], a Pandoc-based presentation tool written in Haskell.

One of the nice things about patat using Pandoc is that the input file format can be any of the ones supported by Pandoc (e.g. rST, Org, LaTeX, etc).

[0]: https://github.com/jaspervdj/patat

Thanks for sharing.

The compiled binary is just 39KB. Love it.

What's more, org mode offers export to other presentation formats (for example latex-beaker).

org-reveal indeed looks the most pleasant and I use it to create my presentations.

I love org-reveal, but my company prefers to use Google slides for the purpose of sharing slide decks.

This looks like a perfect compromise to me.

Actually used this throughout university and it works really well, specially when you already have a go-to template. Nowadays I use Keynote but if I didn't have it LaTeX would still be my first pick.

In fact, you can use Pandoc along side that feature of LaTeX to go straight from Markdown to PDF slides:

    pandoc slides.md -t beamer -o slides.pdf

It works pretty effortlessly, especially when you pair it with a set of starter files like can be found in this project[1].

https://github.com/jez/pandoc-starter

org-reveal is a great modern text-to-HTML-slides tool, and its results don't need much tweaking.

Amazing, cooler than Prezi (and free)!

The text is overflowing the margins on pages 13 - 15 in the sample [1] linked to from the madoko site.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/daan/madoko/sa...

Perhaps you have existing MD notes that you would like to quickly reuse as slides?

Perhaps your workflow is MD based and you want a way to target Google Slides as an output in addition to the other targets that you already have?

Simplest answer for me would be the ability to use effective version control for slides.

Not always.

Having done this a fair bit, I've often found that if I have a somewhat minimal template (perhaps haven't gotten to the design stage of a talk and I'm just fleshing out the content of the slides), it's far slower to fire up a GUI and make 50-odd slides than it is to write a Markdown document.

Example:

---

#This is a headline

##This is my subhead.

* And * Some * bullets

---

That took me 14 seconds. Creating a new slide, 3 textboxes, and adding in the text in a GUI would take me significantly longer. And that multiplies up for each slide.

That's particularly true if I'm having to produce a lot of similar slideshows, for an extended course or something similar.

In that case, Markdown -> Powerpoint or similar tools are an absolute godsend.

Automation could be one reason. For example you might have a weekly meeting and wish to show some relevant metrics and graphs updated for every week, then you could generate such a set of slides using a script triggered by cron.

Thanks for the replies - I guess just because I don't find something useful doesn't mean that others wont - its always nice to have additional tools

Going to have to chime in that I recently tried making slides in Google Docs and found the experience absolutely horrible. Trying to add numbered bullet points, and expecting it to be a formatting option as in normal Google Docs, was particularly annoying.

- Conversion to multiple formats, not just slides. E.g., making slides out of this org file was a single command: https://github.com/coventry/tfintro/blob/master/notes.org

- Accessibility via whatever text editor you're already familiar with

- Legible diffs in version control

- Text processing is easy to script

you would like http://impress.github.io/impress.js/

I use MacDown[1], a macOS open source visual Markdown editor. You can select from several styles, toggle features such as GitHub-flavored on and off, and then save as PDF. I'm not sure about its scriptability from the command line.

[1] http://macdown.uranusjr.com

Pandoc?

http://pandoc.org/

"...should be visually appealing"

I would claim that's highly context sensitive. If the goal is to share information in an environment that has keen interest on the content of the presentation the visual appeal is of a tertiary concern at most.

In ideal conditions yes, but many presentations are not in such. Favorites include talks in over-filled rooms in noisy environments (not everybody can hear the speaker properly) and presentations to bosses or professors who judge your presentation by what they think when they look at the slides two weeks later, not remembering a thing of what you said.

This could at the very least be useful to get the initial text on the slides quickly, while still allowing you to fine-tune them in the GUI afterwards.

I think it should be both.

The best example I can think of is the WPF IDE in visual studio, where you have markup and GUI side by side. You change one, it updates the other.

Most people would edit slides in GUI mode only as they currently do.

Pros would spend a lot of time in the markup, which would enable much faster formatting, copy pasting of certain properties, manage invisible items, add meta data to text (like bind this word in that paragraph to a cell in that spreadsheet).

That how powerpoint should evolve if it was still under active development.

Also think of this use case: generate a powerpoint deck automatically from a system. You definitely want to be able to edit your markup for the template, and be able to generate markup from code.

I'm terrible in visuals. I rather provide the raw content and someone else makes it beautiful.

For a team page that's pictures of the team and their roles.

For a product it is pictures from my product designer. Or specs that might be put in a nice looking table.

For user scenarios it is photos again, but with a caption. And yes, if I do it myself that caption will look ugly.

So text templates are super useful to me. I'm also much better in using icons than designing them. :-)